Drake's Diary

On Craftsmanship

 An Old Chinese Proverb       “When you buy the best, you only cry once.”

 I’d like to say a few words on the nature of CRAFTSMANSHIP, not in the technical sense, but in the spirit of the endeavor. When he was a young man, the 19th Century German romantic poet Heinrich Heine took a tour of the French cathedrals with a friend. They saved the great cathedral at Amiens for the end of their holiday. Heine briefly recorded in a letter their first sight of the massive structure: 

 “When I lately stood with a friend before Amiens Cathedral, he asked me how it happened that we can no longer build such works. I replied: Dear Alphonse, men in those days had CONVICTIONS. We moderns have OPINIONS. It requires something more than opinions to build a Cathedral.”

 Craftsmen, those men and women who work at a particular skill until their hand s and their brains labor as one, I think it’s not too much of a stretch to say, have continued in that tradition, in that way of thinking, as the cathedral builders. It is the same approach. And we might also say that the emotional input is not so dissimilar either: because there is a real difference between a passion for quality, for making something as perfectly as it can be envisioned — and simply making as much as you can as quickly as you can. There is a real difference.

 As I began with a 19th Century writer, let me end with another, the British writer Thomas Carlyle, who spoke about this difference between the craftsman and the idea of mass production, and gave us a true maxim for the marketplace:

 “There is practically nothing that some man cannot make a little worse and sell a little cheaper — and he who considers only the price is that man’s lawful prey.”

 “Lawful” of course is the operative word. The law in its great democratic wisdom assumes that we are all capable of education. In their commitment to and passion for quality — for making something the best that can be known, for wedding form to function in the most satisfying way we can imagine, and for refusing to be content with the short-sighted and shoddy — these artisans deserve our respect, admiration, and allegiance.